"Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision."

"What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it."

"To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death."

"Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness"."

"People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult."

"There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society- and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned- and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own existence."

"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."

"There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself."

"If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs...are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change."

"Freud was so imbued with the spirit of his culture that he could not go beyond certain limits which were set by it. These very limits became limitations for his understanding even of the sick individual, they handicapped his understanding of the normal individual and of the irrational phenomena operating in social life."

"Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market."

"The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgement of the validity of the doctrine and of the values which it implies, although such analysis may lead to a better understanding of the real meaning of a doctrine and thereby influence one's value judgement."

"The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man."

"If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself-to his reason and his conscience-and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation."

"Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others."

"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality."

"In studying the psychological significance of a religious or political doctrine, we must first bear in mind that the psychological analysis does not imply a judgement concerning the truth of the doctrine one analyzes. This latter question can be decided only in terms of the logical structure of the problem itself."

"An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present."

"The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life."

"Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?"

"Love is a power which produces love."

"Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."

"Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning."

"We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake."

"In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change."

"Modern man thinks he loses something-time-when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains- except kill it."

"Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties."

"Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint."

"When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer."

"To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."

"The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."

"In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."

"I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is they would say if they are honest that it is a big department store with new things every week - all the money to buy them and maybe a little more than the neighbours."

"Since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present."

"Immature love says "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you.""

"If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others."

"If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology."

"The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.."

"The right to express out thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality."

"The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market-it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself."

"Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity."

"A society whose members are helpless need idols."

"Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being-and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One."

"The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane."

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love."

"Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort."

"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist."

"Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown."